Juniper bakes 250Gbps core router chip Juniper Networks has said it has new silicon in the oven that will soon let its T Series core routers reach a full duplex per-slot capacity of 250 gigabits per second. On Thursday, the company said trials with products using the chipset, an in-house affair fabbed at 45nm, are penned for the second half of 2010 and will be …
A thousand of my server on it's "1Gbps port" would about use up the 250Gbps and 16,000 of them to use up the 4Tbps rack.
If you put 2 x 5 disk RAID5 with 2T drives, that's 256000 Terabytes via a 4Tbps rack, using maybe 4 mega watts of electricity.
You could maybe cache all of the useful bits of the Internet on that?
If Users had 20Mps download... that would be 2 Million simultaneous users to eat your 4Tbps rack.
At typical levels of traffic/contention (as people take breaks to sleep, read the content etc) you could supply a largish country. Or a small one with peak time true HD quality VOD.
Who are these 4Tbps racks for?
They are in racks at IXP's or elsewhere. They are backbone routers. Users connect behind them on other routing nodes.
I have only just finished upgrading our core network to 10G MPLS but other ISP's/ Carriers are link-aggregating 4x 10G ports prior to the move to 100G links.
This just adds more capacity for the Tier-1's like Telia, Global-Crossing et al who provide IP-Transit services to Tier-2 or National ISP's like mine (full BGP-Table/ exit point from the Autonomous System).
Tier-1 carriers carry alot of traffic from customers like me for destinations unreachable via peering as they have full-connectivity.
And this is what gear like this is used for in the core.
Even the big Tier-2's (just a few more routes to get) like BT, France Telecom etc woud probably be interested in this.
They're for the global telco's. Tier One ISPs aren't in the habit of changing their core routers very often as you're looking at hundreds of millions and into the billions in network investment before its necessary. So the core routers need to be able to scale to support increases in the data transmitted.
At this level they're basically designing equipment to specifications given to them by the telcos.
10 Years ago it was rare that carriers had a 10 Gigabit backbone themselves (they were just starting to come online and it cost the carriers an insane amount of money to implement), now I work for a (admittedly massive) manufacturing company that uses one between main sites and there are many companies that do similar. 10 Gig is effectively becoming common.
When you consider that a transatlantic cable operates in the terabits per second and there's a lot of the you can start to get some sense of the amount of 1's and 0's that are transmitted. Just imagine how much traffic google uses with it's hundreds of thousands of servers pushing data out. You've got to remember the internet isn't just the www , phone calls, data communication between businesses etc That's why these devices are needed and that's why they need to be as fast as they do.
Junipers main market is the Tier-1 carriers because their gear performs better as this article clearly shows...But it isn't only that - they are also a great deal more manageable and logical to work with.
I use a mixture of Cisco and Juniper in the core. Although I have 10 years experience with Cisco in ISP network engineering and only 2 on Juniper, - I always influence purchasing decisions in favour of Juniper when I can. If I had my way, I would kick cisco out of the network tomorrow.
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